Troubleshooting analysis of issues associated with equipment, particularly in the case of encrypted and/or uninteresting content, relies on the use of data captures of information that must be collected. Examples of such data captures include, but are not limited to, network traffic captures and video captures. In many scenarios, the actual encrypted and/or uninteresting content collected within the “capture” mechanism cannot be decrypted as decryption keys are not available.
Encrypted content typically has a high level of entropy within the encrypted data. The level of entropy associated within data affects the operation of many data compression algorithms, because these data compression algorithms attempt to reduce data by identifying compressible patterns that can be replaced by shorter symbols. As a result, compressing encrypted content does not necessarily provide any reasonable level of compression gain. In other words, there is little point in compressing encrypted content. The same is also true of payload data carried within TCP/UDP/HTTP/ETC protocols, where the information is of a binary format that has a sufficiently high entropy that normal compression is not very effective. Thus, there is a need for systems that operate more efficiently with respect to capturing data for troubleshooting analysis.